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Could Florida Trucker Linked By DNA To 2 Murders Also Be Michigan Serial Killer?
A string of murders in Grand Rapids in the 1990s went unsolved, but police now wonder if they have their man.
There was more good news in the field of genetic genealogy this month after Michigan’s Kent County Sheriff’s Office announced it had solved not one but two cold case murders using the technology.
And in doing so, authorities may also have managed to crack a serial murder case that had perplexed investigators for decades — because the man now in custody might have been responsible for them all.
Sharon Kay Hammack
It was October 3rd 1996, and a delivery driver in Michigan’s South Kent County was about to make a grisly discovery. When he stopped at the side of the road to investigate a suspicious bundle, he found the body of 29-year-old Sharon Kay Hammack.
She had been raped, strangled, stabbed twice in the head and hog-tied before being rolled up in a blanket and dumped unceremoniously by a highway. Sharon had been pregnant with her third child when she died, and it’s thought her struggles with addiction had led to sex work, which in turn put her in the path of a predator.
Although Sharon’s family had tried to get her clean through drug rehabilitation programmes after becoming afraid about news of prostitutes disappearing, they had failed and she remained on the streets.
Her killer was never caught, but police were determined not to let her be forgotten.
Genetic genealogy reveals a surprise
When investigators heard about the developments in genetic genealogy that were transforming cold cases into solved cases, they submitted DNA from Sharon’s crime scene to see if they could find a match that might lead to a suspect.
It was this year that they had a surprise. Not only was there a match for Sharon’s crime scene, but there was also a link to another murder being re-investigated at the same time by State Police in Maryland.
This unnamed victim had been killed in 2006, and the new genetic analysis performed on the evidence left…
